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I was giving a keynote at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference several years ago and I mentioned this book and movie and got blank stares.
The book isn’t that great actually. It reads like a manifesto and lecturing. One of the few times the movie is better than the book.
You’ve got Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas to start with. As antagonist and protagonist. President Kennedy actually allowed them to film the opening fight scene outside the White House, he was so impressed with the story. The movie was originally scheduled for a December 1963 release, but Burt Lancaster forced them to delay it as he felt it was too soon after the assassination.
This was the second of Frankenheimer’s “paranoid” trilogy after The Manchurian Candidate.
The mistress part, played by Ava Gardner, was based on General MacArthur and his long time mistress.
When Kirk Douglas is entering the Pentagon those are real guards who had no clue who he was and saluted him because he was in costume as a Colonel. The Pentagon had refused to allow filming there which makes sense since…
